Announcements

Join the ongoing conversation on Discord: https://discord.gg/w6Tpkp2

Please read the current update for instructions on downloading the latest update. Players with Mac versions of the game will not be affected, but you will have a slightly longer wait for your version of the new maps. Please make a copy of your character folder before running the new update, just to make sure you don't lose any of your custom work.

It looks like we can give everyone a list of minimum specs for running City of Titans. Please keep in mind that this is 'for now' until we are able to add more graphics and other system refinements. Currently you will need :
Windows 10 or later required; no Intel integrated graphics like UHD, must have AMD or NVIDIA card or discrete chipset with 4Gb or more of VRAM
At least 16GB of main DRAM.
These stats may change as we continue to test.

To purchase your copy of the City of Titans Launcher, visit our store at https://store.missingworldsmedia.com/ A purchase of $50 or more will give you a link to download the Launcher for Windows or Mac based machines.

Drap rates for high end items

62 posts / 0 new
Last post
LaughingAlex
Offline
Last seen: 8 years 3 weeks ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/08/2013 - 15:55
Drap rates for high end items

One thing I'd come across looking at the diablo 3 forums was how blizzard was implementing rare drops, in that, if a certain amount of time passes without a drop, they automatically increase the chances of that drop coming up. The reason they are doing that is similar to the reason CoX had the streak-breaker; to prevent extreme random number generator bad luck.

So what are your thoughts on this? Should we do something similar for drops? We had people even a good while after the incarnate trials came out for example that ever saw a very rare purple drop in a number of trials. Should we have an incrementing drop chance to keep things fair based on the time or number of things done? It'd cut down on the grind for some by a lot to focus more on the fun.

I realized something today(5/8/2014) that many MMORPG players, are not like us who enjoyed CoX. They enjoy repetitiveness and predictability, rather then unpredictability. We on the other hand enjoy unpredictability and variety.

oOStaticOo
oOStaticOo's picture
Offline
Last seen: 8 years 11 months ago
Joined: 10/24/2013 - 06:21
I like this idea. I think it

I like this idea. I think it's a good one. I'd also go so far as to say that if they have different levels of rarities that the "Common" stuff only be sold at a Vendor of some kind. Thusly increasing the odds of obtaining "Rare" items.

I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!

Lothic
Lothic's picture
Offline
Last seen: 2 months 3 weeks ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/02/2013 - 00:27
Well to start with sometimes

Well to start with sometimes random is just random. That basically covers everything about this.

But to add a little more I would never base a "rare drop streak breaker" on "time passed since last drop". All that would encourage people to do is simply rotate through a bunch of alts over time allowing each individual alt to rack up enough streak time to get an ultra-rare pretty much every time they're logged in.

Now I might be a little more sympathetic to a streak breaker that's based on "number of attempts without a drop" because I agree if you do something like 100 Incarnate trials and don't get a Purple drop it can be a little annoying. But even with that I don't think a streak breaker like this should ever guarantee a drop after X number of attempts - at best it should only skew the odds in the player's favor by a certain maximum percentage until it happens because ultimately once again "random is random".

CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012

Minotaur
Minotaur's picture
Offline
Last seen: 3 years 8 months ago
Developerkickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 12/05/2012 - 12:49
Personal unofficial opinion:

Personal unofficial opinion:

You can do this a couple of ways. One is with a "magic find" type stat like the Diablo games have, but in our case it increments each time you get a drop, ups your roll either additively or multiplicatively on the table for how good a drop you get, and resets when you get a drop better than whatever.

Another is to say that you won't get say 5 commons in a row, but there is no guarantee of how good a drop you get next, just that it will be better than common.

Tech Team and Forum Moderator

Lothic
Lothic's picture
Offline
Last seen: 2 months 3 weeks ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/02/2013 - 00:27
Minotaur wrote:
Minotaur wrote:

Personal unofficial opinion:
You can do this a couple of ways. [...] in our case it increments each time you get a drop, ups your roll either additively or multiplicatively on the table for how good a drop you get, and resets when you get a drop better than whatever.
Another is to say that you won't get say 5 commons in a row, but there is no guarantee of how good a drop you get next, just that it will be better than common.

Yeah this is probably the best way to do it. Anything that prevents a "common drop streak" while keeping ultra rare drops effectively random is a good balance for this.

CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012

Redlynne
Redlynne's picture
Offline
Last seen: 1 day 2 hours ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/28/2013 - 21:15
Minotaur wrote:
Minotaur wrote:

One is with a "magic find" type stat like the Diablo games have

Just between you, me and the entire internet ... I absolutely hate and despise the Diablo system of Magic Find (and its corollary, Gold Find) because it is literally a system by which the rich get richer and the poor stay shafted. Magic Find and Gold Find, more than anything else, are modifiers that encourage, reward and perpetuate the WORST farming instincts in pretty much any game system I've seen. Mind you, that's a function of such modifiers being "equipment modifiers" putting pressure on builds and strategies that essentially result in a vicious circle, rather than a virtuous one. The overall situation only gets worse with "Unique" Items (which strangely enough turn out to be the predominant supermajority of what everyone winds up using, so how "unique" can they be?), but that's another discussion about why Diablo isn't any fun to play anymore.

Minotaur wrote:

but in our case it increments each time you get a drop, ups your roll either additively or multiplicatively on the table for how good a drop you get, and resets when you get a drop better than whatever.

The way I'd want to run this (if I was building such a system) would be to set things up such that a "rare" drop would essentially be a "1 in a million" event, so you'd be rolling against a random number generator between 0 and 999,999 (essentially). Each Foe NPC you defeat would then add to a bias stack ... say +1 per Pet, +2 per Minion, +3 per Lieutenant, +4 per Boss, +5 per Elite Boss, +6 per Arch-villain, +7 per Monster, +8 per Giant Monster. This bias stacking would continue until it gets "reset" by the award of a "rare" drop. So essentially the odds of getting a "rare" drop progressively improve the longer you *actively* PLAY (as opposed to the longer you stay logged in), but you have to be playing for a really long time before your chances of getting that "rare" drop improve significantly. The way the whole thing works then is that the RNG just rolls for 0-999,999 as normal and adds the current bias stack value to it, and if the result is 1,000,000 or higher ... you get a "rare" drop. Whole thing can be run on positive integer variables to keep it fast and simple, and the only mathematical operations required are random number generation, addition and comparison to threshold value in an IF-THEN-ELSE statement.

That's the basic "shape" of how I would want to formulate such a "drop bias" styled system. You can mess with some of the values involved (100k instead of 1 million, or 10 million instead of 1 million, and so on), but the important thing is the basic framework. Heck, if it makes things easier/faster on the computational side of thing, you could even rig the randomizer to work on a powers of 2 basis and just read a single bit (the "highest" bit) of the resulting binary number. 2^20=1,048,576 ... so read only the 21st bit of the number to determine if the variable has a value of 1 or 0. That kind of thing. Only problem with taking such shortcuts like that is that it can make adjusting settings to shift the game balance more difficult to do later on if your first assumption winds up not being/remaining valid over time. See "premature optimization" for further reading.


Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.
Lothic
Lothic's picture
Offline
Last seen: 2 months 3 weeks ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/02/2013 - 00:27
Redlynne wrote:
Redlynne wrote:

This bias stacking would continue until it gets "reset" by the award of a "rare" drop. So essentially the odds of getting a "rare" drop progressively improve the longer you *actively* PLAY (as opposed to the longer you stay logged in), but you have to be playing for a really long time before your chances of getting that "rare" drop improve significantly.

I think most people would agree that a "drop streak breaker" should be based on overall player effort instead of time since last rare drop. In other words it would favor players based on amount of content they played/achieved versus simply how long it's been since their last rare drop.

But I'm not really sure a streak breaker algorithm should be set up to eventually guarantee a rare drop no matter how long that guarantee takes to kick in. The system should always maintain some degree of "randomness per drop" because otherwise someone, somewhere would figure out the easiest steps needed to minimize the absolute total time it would take to generate a "guaranteed drop" scenario and then it would become the top "go-to" farm of the game.

So yes we should have a streak breaker that increases the chances of getting a rare drop based on how much effort we put into the game... but only up to a certain point. After that max bias point is reached we need to let the RNG (with its heavily maxed "breaker" bias) do its job until it finally clicks off a rare drop. This safeguard would keep any measure of absolute predictability out of the equation and safely beyond the reach of any player who would attempt to abuse this.

CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012

Brand X
Brand X's picture
Offline
Last seen: 4 years 5 months ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 11/01/2013 - 00:26
I never had a problem with

I never had a problem with CoH's drop rate. Yes, it sucked, could go forever with out the cool shiney, but they also weren't game breaking OMG YOU SUCK WITHOUT THEM.

Lothic
Lothic's picture
Offline
Last seen: 2 months 3 weeks ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/02/2013 - 00:27
Brand X wrote:
Brand X wrote:

I never had a problem with CoH's drop rate. Yes, it sucked, could go forever with out the cool shiney, but they also weren't game breaking OMG YOU SUCK WITHOUT THEM.

Yeah I never had any issue with CoH's "per critter" drop rates. The only place where a drop streak breaker might be useful would be for something like trials where you might invest 30+ minutes or even several hours on something and get stuck with a streak of non-uber rewards.

CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012

Gangrel
Offline
Last seen: 1 week 2 days ago
11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 09/15/2013 - 15:14
Redlynne wrote:
Redlynne wrote:

Minotaur wrote:
but in our case it increments each time you get a drop, ups your roll either additively or multiplicatively on the table for how good a drop you get, and resets when you get a drop better than whatever.
The way I'd want to run this (if I was building such a system) would be to set things up such that a "rare" drop would essentially be a "1 in a million" event, so you'd be rolling against a random number generator between 0 and 999,999 (essentially). Each Foe NPC you defeat would then add to a bias stack ... say +1 per Pet, +2 per Minion, +3 per Lieutenant, +4 per Boss, +5 per Elite Boss, +6 per Arch-villain, +7 per Monster, +8 per Giant Monster. This bias stacking would continue until it gets "reset" by the award of a "rare" drop. So essentially the odds of getting a "rare" drop progressively improve the longer you *actively* PLAY (as opposed to the longer you stay logged in), but you have to be playing for a really long time before your chances of getting that "rare" drop improve significantly. The way the whole thing works then is that the RNG just rolls for 0-999,999 as normal and adds the current bias stack value to it, and if the result is 1,000,000 or higher ... you get a "rare" drop. Whole thing can be run on positive integer variables to keep it fast and simple, and the only mathematical operations required are random number generation, addition and comparison to threshold value in an IF-THEN-ELSE statement.
That's the basic "shape" of how I would want to formulate such a "drop bias" styled system. You can mess with some of the values involved (100k instead of 1 million, or 10 million instead of 1 million, and so on), but the important thing is the basic framework. Heck, if it makes things easier/faster on the computational side of thing, you could even rig the randomizer to work on a powers of 2 basis and just read a single bit (the "highest" bit) of the resulting binary number. 2^20=1,048,576 ... so read only the 21st bit of the number to determine if the variable has a value of 1 or 0. That kind of thing. Only problem with taking such shortcuts like that is that it can make adjusting settings to shift the game balance more difficult to do later on if your first assumption winds up not being/remaining valid over time. See "premature optimization" for further reading.

Strangely enough, I was looking at a speedrun for Legend of Zelda earlier on today, and they actually mentioned how you could get mobs to drop loot that they normally didn't drop (or more accurately, how to know what will drop and when it will drop).

http://speeddemosarchive.com/Zelda1.html

Quote:

1) I reject your reality.... and substitute my own
2) Not to be used when upset... will void warranty
3) Stoke me a clipper i will be back for dinner
4) I have seen more intelligence from an NPC AI in TR beta, than from most MMO players.

Lin Chiao Feng
Lin Chiao Feng's picture
Offline
Last seen: 5 days 26 min ago
Developerkickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 11/02/2013 - 09:27
Let me throw a screwball into

Let me throw a screwball into the mix:

The current assumption is that drops are determined by a dice throw. Basically, there's X% of something dropping, possibly modified by whether or not something rare dropped recently.

What if, instead, you used a card-shuffling system. So over the long haul, you're pretty much guaranteed K common drops, L uncommons, M rares, N very rares, etc. over a rather large number of events, but there's no guarantee of the order.

Blackjack or poker instead of craps or roulette.

(Implementation is easy: randomly choose a seed for a deterministic RNG, such as an LFSR, and just keep track of where you are in the sequence.)

Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...

Lothic
Lothic's picture
Offline
Last seen: 2 months 3 weeks ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/02/2013 - 00:27
Lin Chiao Feng wrote:
Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

Let me throw a screwball into the mix:
The current assumption is that drops are determined by a dice throw. Basically, there's X% of something dropping, possibly modified by whether or not something rare dropped recently.
What if, instead, you used a card-shuffling system. So over the long haul, you're pretty much guaranteed K common drops, L uncommons, M rares, N very rares, etc. over a rather large number of events, but there's no guarantee of the order.
Blackjack or poker instead of craps or roulette.
(Implementation is easy: randomly choose a seed for a deterministic RNG, such as an LFSR, and just keep track of where you are in the sequence.)

Are you talking about having a weighted result instead of a pure randomness? As far as I understood it this is pretty much how games like these have always worked. Over the course of killing various numbers of minions, lieutenants, bosses and so on you're pretty much going to get an even ratio of "K common drops, L uncommons, M rares, N very rares" based on the underlying weight given to each class of drop.

Now if like cards you're actually talking about some kind of a closed system, where somehow there's a "max number of drops" of each type you could ever get before you're guaranteed a very rare drop then no, I don't see how that cleanly applies to a MMO like this which by definition is (and should be) an open-ended random system. The word "random" is the key - what you're describing is effectively a non-random system where you just have to play long enough for your payoff to come around again.

I'd much rather have a slim chance to have a streak of very rares... something a random system (even a biased one) would allow but your closed sequence system would likely (and ironically) prevent.

CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012

Lin Chiao Feng
Lin Chiao Feng's picture
Offline
Last seen: 5 days 26 min ago
Developerkickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 11/02/2013 - 09:27
Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:

Are you talking about having a weighted result instead of a pure randomness? As far as I understood it this is pretty much how games like these have always worked. Over the course of killing various numbers of minions, lieutenants, bosses and so on you're pretty much going to get an even ratio of "K common drops, L uncommons, M rares, N very rares" based on the underlying weight given to each class of drop.

No, I'm not talking about the "evenness" you get with a weighted random system and the Weak Law of Large Numbers (WLLN). That's still throwing dice. Craps instead of blackjack.

Lothic wrote:

Now if like cards you're actually talking about some kind of a closed system, where somehow there's a "max number of drops" of each type you could ever get before you're guaranteed a very rare drop

Not talking about caps on each type, either. Yes, that would suck.

Lothic wrote:

The word "random" is the key - what you're describing is effectively a non-random system where you just have to play long enough for your payoff to come around again.

Personally, I would not refer to a shuffled deck of 32,767 cards as "non-random." It's a form of dependent random variable.

And that's the whole reason I'm throwing it in there: if you used an independent random variable (i.e. dice) instead, you then have to add streak breakers and history weighting and other nonsense in order to keep the players from feeling ripped off because their rewards aren't mapping to the WLLN at all, while others are getting rares and very rares seemingly routinely.

Lothic wrote:

I'd much rather have a slim chance to have a streak of very rares... something a random system (even a biased one) would allow but your closed sequence system would likely (and ironically) prevent.

Nothing ironic about it: it's a design goal. Further, developers can use it to more closely relate risks and rewards.

Some gamers like poker and blackjack, where you can try to keep track of the deck. Some like craps, roulette, and slots. YMMV.

Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...

Lothic
Lothic's picture
Offline
Last seen: 2 months 3 weeks ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/02/2013 - 00:27
Lin Chiao Feng wrote:
Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

Lothic wrote:
Are you talking about having a weighted result instead of a pure randomness? As far as I understood it this is pretty much how games like these have always worked. Over the course of killing various numbers of minions, lieutenants, bosses and so on you're pretty much going to get an even ratio of "K common drops, L uncommons, M rares, N very rares" based on the underlying weight given to each class of drop.

No, I'm not talking about the "evenness" you get with a weighted random system and the Weak Law of Large Numbers (WLLN). That's still throwing dice. Craps instead of blackjack.
Lothic wrote:
Now if like cards you're actually talking about some kind of a closed system, where somehow there's a "max number of drops" of each type you could ever get before you're guaranteed a very rare drop
Not talking about caps on each type, either. Yes, that would suck.

Actually I still believe you are talking about caps AND a fundamentally non-random system at the same time. In your "card countable/blackjack" analogy you're saying you want a predefined number of each class of drop. Let's say your hypothetical closed sequence has 100 commons, 20 uncommons, 5 rares and 1 very rare. So as I'm randomly clicking through your set of drops I know that no matter what I'll get a very rare at least by my 126th drop (as the worst case scenario). Sure I might have gotten that same drop anytime between the 1st and 125th time, but I know with absolute 100% certainty I'll have it within 126 drops. There's nothing remotely random about that at all assuming you play long enough.

Besides what starts or maintains this closed sequence of yours? You say that a weighted/biased "dice" based system would have to be difficult to deal with but it sounds far more tedious to deal with some kind of dedicated data structure to keep track of "counting" your card-analogized system than a simple dice-based RNG with a single historical bias value adjusting the roll.

As I said earlier in the thread I fundamentally disagree with any system that ends up "guaranteeing" any type of drop not only for farm-prevention but for the sake of entitlement as well. No one is "entitled" to get any type of drop either after an arbitrary amount of time or an arbitrary amount of accomplishment. So while I have no problem with simple streak breakers that skew dice rolls in players' favors when needed I'll never accept the need to dream up ways to provide players with a sure thing.

Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

Lothic wrote:
The word "random" is the key - what you're describing is effectively a non-random system where you just have to play long enough for your payoff to come around again.

Personally, I would not refer to a shuffled deck of 32,767 cards as "non-random." It's a form of dependent random variable.
And that's the whole reason I'm throwing it in there: if you used an independent random variable (i.e. dice) instead, you then have to add streak breakers and history weighting and other nonsense in order to keep the players from feeling ripped off because their rewards aren't mapping to the WLLN at all, while others are getting rares and very rares seemingly routinely.

I don't care what other players "seem" to be getting or what they "feel" is right or wrong. As long as we know the system is fundamentally random it will also be fundamentally fair. As they say, random is random.

Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

Lothic wrote:
I'd much rather have a slim chance to have a streak of very rares... something a random system (even a biased one) would allow but your closed sequence system would likely (and ironically) prevent.

Nothing ironic about it: it's a design goal. Further, developers can use it to more closely relate risks and rewards.

So you're saying you'd rather prevent being able to get 10 very rare drops in a row just to also be able to prevent getting 10 commons in a row? Why does a game system have to punish the very lucky at the same time it's doing something to help the very unlucky?

Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

Some gamers like poker and blackjack, where you can try to keep track of the deck. Some like craps, roulette, and slots. YMMV.

I'll accept your observation that some people like games that can be "tracked" like poker or blackjack. I just flatly reject the idea that a MMO rewards drop system needs to be even remotely trackable or predictable by any stretch of the imagination. YMMV.

CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012

WarBird
WarBird's picture
Offline
Last seen: 5 years 9 months ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/17/2013 - 19:11
My understanding is that the

My understanding is that the philosophical approach the Devs are taking is "multiple routes to rewards". So you can grind for stuff, buy it for cash, or trade 'Ultra-widgets' for it.

Personally, I don't see anything inherently virtuous about "Truly Random" rather than "Weighted Odds." If I'm the unluckiest guy in the world, at least I know if I run through this particular content 100 times, I'll eventually get the "Moss-Covered Three-Handled Family Credenza". If I'm the Luckiest guy, I'll get it first try. Why shouldn't patience and perseverance be rewarded as much as outright luck?

I don't like a model where only 1 in a 1000 people get to have the cool thing because they happened to be in the right place at the right time. There's no way to construe that as fair. I'll grant that the thing should still be rare, so that when you get it, there's either a sense of "Woo-Hoo! What a lucky break!" or "Woo-Hoo! Finally got it!" But just saying " You didn't get it, therefore you don't deserve it." doesn't hold water for me.

What makes and keeps games like this fun for me is the sense that there is a level playing field. And that I can actually do something to level the field myself. If it means that eventually, even if I'm cursed, I can get the thing I want by working for it. Otherwise, you're saying that some are Blessed and some are Cursed, and that's their lot.

If I can only get the ultra rare "Purple Codpiece of Endurance" to complete my set of Purple armor in a particular mission, then yeah, I'd like to know that every time I did the mission my odds got a teensy bit better. It should still only drop for me once in 100 plays, but I know, even if everything goes wrong, if I do this 100 times I'll get it. Might get it in 1, or 12, or 50. If a guy wants to farm this 500 times to get 10 of them, more power to him. Because, if everybody knows they can get it through sheer stick-to-it-iveness, or buying it for $9.99 at the cash store, it will keep the AH price low enough to make him think hard about taking that route. Wasn't that your goal, to limit farming?

Pleonast
Pleonast's picture
Offline
Last seen: 2 months 1 week ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/13/2013 - 19:38
I don't like having drops in

I don't like having drops in a superhero game. More specifically, heroes shouldn't be getting loot. It's okay for villains to get loot. :D

And if we have drops, I'm kind of against having different rarities at all. I think all loot should be of equivalent value, in terms of game balance. That is, all "level 20" items should be the same value. The difference between drops should be their utility to the player. So maybe the +20 healing item has the same value as the +15 melee-damage item, but one of them is more useful to me than the other.

Kickstart Backer # 771

WarBird
WarBird's picture
Offline
Last seen: 5 years 9 months ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/17/2013 - 19:11
Pleonast wrote:
Pleonast wrote:

I don't like having drops in a superhero game. More specifically, heroes shouldn't be getting loot. It's okay for villains to get loot. :D
And if we have drops, I'm kind of against having different rarities at all. I think all loot should be of equivalent value, in terms of game balance. That is, all "level 20" items should be the same value. The difference between drops should be their utility to the player. So maybe the +20 healing item has the same value as the +15 melee-damage item, but one of them is more useful to me than the other.

In point of fact, I'm more philosophically behind this, myself. I think "loot" is just MMO shorthand. There's plenty of people, however, that insist on Crafting and Auctions. That means picking through the debris after fighting minions. :) At least, I think there's enough strong opinion to keep us from having to "dice" over it between ourselves.

Honestly, bidding and selling for a 20% of my game time sounds even less heroic than "adapting some bad guys' tech to my purposes." Whether we have "mob drops" or not seems to be a done deal. I think in this thread we're just talking about how to make it fair.

JayBezz
JayBezz's picture
Offline
Last seen: 4 years 8 months ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/08/2013 - 14:54
Pleonast wrote:
Pleonast wrote:

I don't like having drops in a superhero game. More specifically, heroes shouldn't be getting loot. It's okay for villains to get loot. :D
And if we have drops, I'm kind of against having different rarities at all. I think all loot should be of equivalent value, in terms of game balance. That is, all "level 20" items should be the same value. The difference between drops should be their utility to the player. So maybe the +20 healing item has the same value as the +15 melee-damage item, but one of them is more useful to me than the other.

Does this mean you're against different "colored" loot for loot level that does not correspond with character level?

Crowd Control Enthusiast

AlienMafia
AlienMafia's picture
Offline
Last seen: 3 years 10 months ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 08/26/2013 - 09:45
Loot just means something

Loot just means something that is dropped from NPCs or mission complete and in our case it is enhancements, salvage, incarnate pieces, etc. and rarity just means the color or how "good" it is.

In CoH. The game kinda seperated the green recipes and even seperated some within each set like Numina's set. Numina's +\+ was considered a higher teir green while Numina's recharge/endurance was of the lower-mid green even though they were party the same set. This is what the devs will have to go through during beta is determining which sets and which specific IOs are being used the most or any other determining factor per character.

Then once they have figured out their "1-10" ratings for each set and each IO in a set then they can set a mark of "With each kill without a 'rare' drop, will add a greater chance on next kill for a 'rare' drop" with rare being 7+, 8+, 9+, or 10+.

-AlienMafia (Justice Server)
Main: Thorns 13xx Badges

oOStaticOo
oOStaticOo's picture
Offline
Last seen: 8 years 11 months ago
Joined: 10/24/2013 - 06:21
I didn't really have any

I didn't really have any problems or issues with the way CoH did it. I have always hated the Need, Greed, or Pass style of other MMO's. I liked getting my drops from CoH the way they had it done. The only thing I had wished they'd done differently instead, was eliminate the "Common" drop. If it's so common why couldn't we just buy that item from a vendor somewhere for 100 inf? Like I said, I'd like to see Uncommon, Rare, and Ultra Rare drops only. I think that would eliminate a lot of excess rubbish that most people just ended up deleting to make room for other drops. Plus it would enhance the probability of you getting that Ultra Rare if you only had to worry about three kinds of drops instead of 4.

I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!

AlienMafia
AlienMafia's picture
Offline
Last seen: 3 years 10 months ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 08/26/2013 - 09:45
Agreed. Im on Neverwinter

Agreed. Im on Neverwinter right now and they have need greed pass and i hate it.

I have mixed opinion on commons though. I agree what ur saying but at the same time i think we need to have common drops. The stores that sell them are not out fighting crime. We are and the prices of the stores need to resemble a buy and sell where the price of the item in store is more then what you sell to the vendor for.

To be continued... Maybe if i remember

-AlienMafia (Justice Server)
Main: Thorns 13xx Badges

Gangrel
Offline
Last seen: 1 week 2 days ago
11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 09/15/2013 - 15:14
oOStaticOo wrote:
oOStaticOo wrote:

I didn't really have any problems or issues with the way CoH did it. I have always hated the Need, Greed, or Pass style of other MMO's. I liked getting my drops from CoH the way they had it done.

Fair enough, I can understand this

Quote:

The only thing I had wished they'd done differently instead, was eliminate the "Common" drop. If it's so common why couldn't we just buy that item from a vendor somewhere for 100 inf?

You mean like you could in CoX, where you could go to a vendor store and buy it? But you could also save inf by having drops that you could use so you could also slot it. Also you can sell stuff that you don't want, either to other players or to NPC's to raise more cash.

Quote:

Like I said, I'd like to see Uncommon, Rare, and Ultra Rare drops only. I think that would eliminate a lot of excess rubbish that most people just ended up deleting to make room for other drops. Plus it would enhance the probability of you getting that Ultra Rare if you only had to worry about three kinds of drops instead of 4.

I can see where you are coming from, however it wouldn't necessarily increase the chances of you getting a drop (it all depends as to how they work out the drop rate and mechanism to be more accurate).

What it would do though, is improve the *appearance* that X drops more often (because you are only paying attention to 3 types of drop and not more).

I can see why you would like the removal of "common drops"... however I would say that its a perception thing, and you would probably spend a considerable amount more time at vendors *buying* stuff, instead of just selling it.

Hell, I rarely went to vendors in WoW to buy gear, I worked with what dropped in my quest from 1 to 90 (exception were tokens/drops that had to redeemed for gear and the *initial* starting area depending on how stuff dropped).

Crafting items, yep, went to them to get started, only returned when I *had* to buy stuff (which to be fair for me was rarely).

Quote:

1) I reject your reality.... and substitute my own
2) Not to be used when upset... will void warranty
3) Stoke me a clipper i will be back for dinner
4) I have seen more intelligence from an NPC AI in TR beta, than from most MMO players.

Lin Chiao Feng
Lin Chiao Feng's picture
Offline
Last seen: 5 days 26 min ago
Developerkickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 11/02/2013 - 09:27
I hate need/greed/pass on STO

I hate need/greed/pass on STO because I never notice it, and wind up with next to no rewards after the mission. Serves me right for paying attention to the larger combat situation, eh?

But I like where Pleonast is going. Loot is a iffy proposition already in fantasy MMOs (Eh? The Platinum Sylph had a +5 Stave of Arse Whuppage on her? Why didn't she use it?!), but in a modern setting it's downright silly. (Why, yes, I'll clean the demons out of your office for a 5% chance at $1000, 95% chance for a bag of gumballs!)

In the Incarnate Trials in CoX, some folks always seemed to get the VR drops while others never got more than uncommons. And the exchange rates to trade the junk you got for the stuff you need were downright usury. The only upside was that if you got a lame drop, you wasted at most 15 minutes of your life.

Far better would be something where there would be some element of randomness, but without such bloody long tails--in both directions--in the probabilities. Something with reasonable bounds. Something where you would run a trial 10 +/- 2 times to get either what you need or something that could be traded for what you need.

Which is kinda-sorta where I was going with the more cards, less dice model. What if, for a given trial or whatever, the reward drops were, for example, spread across a "deck" of 12 cards, with 8 cards being the rewards (which combined give you the Big Awesome Thing) and the other 4 being bonus items (useful, not a booby prize per se, but not part of the combo). This "deck" is specific to your character, and gets "shuffled" when your character starts the trial for the first time. When you complete the trial, a card is drawn, and you get the corresponding reward. After the last card gets drawn, the deck gets reshuffled.

This gives you some randomness to spice things up without making you a slave to the RNG. Because, as much as you might feel uber leet when you get a very rare drop, that was still more luck than skill because someone else who did far better than you at that raid, and further did it five times as much as you, somehow still hasn't gotten a drop like that. Thinking your reward was from skill is implying that their lack of reward is indicative of lack of skill.

This isn't crypto. There's no optimization requirement that rewards be RNG-determined.

Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...

Gangrel
Offline
Last seen: 1 week 2 days ago
11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 09/15/2013 - 15:14
Lin Chiao Feng wrote:
Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

I hate need/greed/pass on STO because I never notice it, and wind up with next to no rewards after the mission. Serves me right for paying attention to the larger combat situation, eh?
But I like where Pleonast is going. Loot is a iffy proposition already in fantasy MMOs (Eh? The Platinum Sylph had a +5 Stave of Arse Whuppage on her? Why didn't she use it?!), but in a modern setting it's downright silly. (Why, yes, I'll clean the demons out of your office for a 5% chance at $1000, 95% chance for a bag of gumballs!)
In the Incarnate Trials in CoX, some folks always seemed to get the VR drops while others never got more than uncommons. And the exchange rates to trade the junk you got for the stuff you need were downright usury. The only upside was that if you got a lame drop, you wasted at most 15 minutes of your life.
Far better would be something where there would be some element of randomness, but without such bloody long tails--in both directions--in the probabilities. Something with reasonable bounds. Something where you would run a trial 10 +/- 2 times to get either what you need or something that could be traded for what you need.
Which is kinda-sorta where I was going with the more cards, less dice model. What if, for a given trial or whatever, the reward drops were, for example, spread across a "deck" of 12 cards, with 8 cards being the rewards (which combined give you the Big Awesome Thing) and the other 4 being bonus items (useful, not a booby prize per se, but not part of the combo). This "deck" is specific to your character, and gets "shuffled" when your character starts the trial for the first time. When you complete the trial, a card is drawn, and you get the corresponding reward. After the last card gets drawn, the deck gets reshuffled.

Would the deck be unique to each trial? Or would it be spread across the trials?

Quote:

This gives you some randomness to spice things up without making you a slave to the RNG. Because, as much as you might feel uber leet when you get a very rare drop, that was still more luck than skill because someone else who did far better than you at that raid, and further did it five times as much as you, somehow still hasn't gotten a drop like that. Thinking your reward was from skill is implying that their lack of reward is indicative of lack of skill.
This isn't crypto. There's no optimization requirement that rewards be RNG-determined.

is the "deck" unique for each trial? or is it spread across several trials?

Is there going to be any form of "rereoll" tokens available (like WoW has for at least their LFR raids), which you can earn by doing other stuff...

How "large" is this deck going to be? How will the game be able to tell if its something that you can use (ie the oh damn, I was going for tank gear, but instead I got DPS gear... something that once again WoW is trying to fix), or will it just be a "token" that you can redeem for a selection of items that you can choose from?

Of course, the people who get more stuff on one character they will *typically* play the game more on that character...

Is this going to lead down the road of "certain stuff is only available in certain areas?"

Quote:

1) I reject your reality.... and substitute my own
2) Not to be used when upset... will void warranty
3) Stoke me a clipper i will be back for dinner
4) I have seen more intelligence from an NPC AI in TR beta, than from most MMO players.

Lin Chiao Feng
Lin Chiao Feng's picture
Offline
Last seen: 5 days 26 min ago
Developerkickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 11/02/2013 - 09:27
Gangrel wrote:
Gangrel wrote:

Would the deck be unique to each trial? Or would it be spread across the trials?

Unique to each trial. This is necessary so the trials don't all have to have the same rewards, and the devs can change things like deck size on a trial-by-trial basis. I'd recommend more cards in the deck for the shorter trials, to help decouple the length of the trial from the "mileage" the payer can get out of it.

Gangrel wrote:

Is there going to be any form of "rereoll" tokens available (like WoW has for at least their LFR raids), which you can earn by doing other stuff...

I'd have to understand the mechanics underlying these "reroll" tokens to be able to answer that. That said, if there were a "reshuffle" mechanism, well, using one wouldn't necessarily be a positive or negative for the player (depends on what "cards" were already drawn), so I'm not sure if that would be a good thing or merely a trivial thing.

Gangrel wrote:

How "large" is this deck going to be?

The number of cards in the deck is equal to the maximum number of times a character would need to run the raid to get the whole set of rewards.

Gangrel wrote:

How will the game be able to tell if its something that you can use (ie the oh damn, I was going for tank gear, but instead I got DPS gear... something that once again WoW is trying to fix), or will it just be a "token" that you can redeem for a selection of items that you can choose from?

I'd prefer a generic token (or crafting component) of some form that can be converted to whichever set the player needs. Kind of like how rewards from Incarnate trials were used to build any of several different enhancements.

Gangrel wrote:

Of course, the people who get more stuff on one character they will *typically* play the game more on that character...

That goes both ways: The character they want more stuff on, they should play more.

Gangrel wrote:

Is this going to lead down the road of "certain stuff is only available in certain areas?"

it can, if desired. Must all rewards come from one great, big, UFO-catcher pool?

Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...

Gangrel
Offline
Last seen: 1 week 2 days ago
11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 09/15/2013 - 15:14
Fair enough, just wanted to

Fair enough, just wanted to make sure.

Still not 100% sold on the "deck of cards" thing though. Although I would say that its probably best for the developers to not announce what method they are necessarily going for either.

The trials linked to certain drops... that is because in CoX there was an uproar in that you had to run *certain* trials for *certain* loot/incarnate unlocks *Looks at Magistarium trial*, because only they gave the right stuff to progress your character.

Quote:

1) I reject your reality.... and substitute my own
2) Not to be used when upset... will void warranty
3) Stoke me a clipper i will be back for dinner
4) I have seen more intelligence from an NPC AI in TR beta, than from most MMO players.

Lin Chiao Feng
Lin Chiao Feng's picture
Offline
Last seen: 5 days 26 min ago
Developerkickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 11/02/2013 - 09:27
Gangrel wrote:
Gangrel wrote:

Still not 100% sold on the "deck of cards" thing though. Although I would say that its probably best for the developers to not announce what method they are necessarily going for either.

I'm not proposing it as a salve for all ills, just as something to use for the really difficult, expensive-in-time-and-effort stuff so you don't frustrate players and drive them off.

Gangrel wrote:

The trials linked to certain drops... that is because in CoX there was an uproar in that you had to run *certain* trials for *certain* loot/incarnate unlocks *Looks at Magistarium trial*, because only they gave the right stuff to progress your character.

I think that kind of thing has been in every game...? Because if not, the players will only run the easiest thing.

Early on in the days of Inventions, there were a set of recipes you could only get via Task Force completions. Didn't matter which TF, and it was one big pool. Result? People figured out how to run the Katie Hannon TF really fast (around 10 minutes, IIRC; most TFs were hours long) and people would just grind that forever. The devs wound up putting in a "must wait x hours between runs" mechanism on those rewards. And there still wasn't enough of a supply of these recipes to get the market prices down to something sane.

For that, we had to wait for Hero/Villain Merits, which you could earn simply by doing something a certain number of times. And then we could finally buy the IOs we needed to make our builds work, instead of grinding the game like a 40-hour job or rerunning TFs for months until the RNG decided it didn't hate us that much.

Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...

Zombie Man
Zombie Man's picture
Offline
Last seen: 10 years 1 month ago
kickstarter
Joined: 07/26/2013 - 19:23
It seems the source of angst

It seems the source of angst over rare drops is when there is a huge disparity in drops and overall reward.

If you spend an hour in a Trial, you shouldn't have the reward range be from Common to Very Rare, but rather Rare or Very Rare, or, at the least, 4 Uncommons. The rationale is that if you have two people do exactly the same thing, one should not walk away with a hundred million points and the other walk away with just a thousand points.

The same thing among other tasks. If you have the drop, regardless of rarity which is fetching a billion points on the market... then that in and of itself is a sign that Something Is Wrong. You don't want to randomly make someone a billionaire because of a lucky roll.

So, rather than find ways to make everyone a member of the Suddenly a Billionaire club, we need to find ways to ease runaway inflation on certain coveted items and flatten out the range of the worthiness of drops from garbage to billions.

Former Online Community Manager & Forum Moderator

Lin Chiao Feng
Lin Chiao Feng's picture
Offline
Last seen: 5 days 26 min ago
Developerkickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 11/02/2013 - 09:27
Yep. Nothing like the

Yep. Nothing like the annoyance of being near someone who got a lucky dice roll and acts like it's all because they earned it.

So when you're evaluating if (for example) 4 Uncommons is comparable to a Rare, see what it takes to convert one to the other. If you can convert a Rare to 4 Uncommons, but it takes 8 Uncommons to convert to a Rare, then rewarding 4 Uncommons is basically rewarding a Rare and then forcing the player to break it down immediately. Rewarding 8 Uncommons has the opposite problem: 8 Uncommons could (theoretically) be converted to any Rare, but a Rare is what it is, and unless there's a 1:1 sidegrade, the player might get stuck with a Rare they can't use. In the latter case you may as well award a token redeemable for any rare, which is where CoX wound up with Hero/Villain Merits.

Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...

Inbetweener
Inbetweener's picture
Offline
Last seen: 2 years 23 hours ago
kickstarter
Joined: 11/03/2013 - 19:30
I liked the way CoH/CoX

I liked the way CoH/CoX handled drops for the most part. I would consider a gauge that increased your chances at rare/unique drops based upon the difficulty level of your missions. I found running something like an ITF at +4 yielded more purple drops than at +0. Once you obtained Incarnate level increases then running TF content @ +4 was a lot more manageable.

"My momma always told me to beware of girls with enhancement diversification"

srmalloy
srmalloy's picture
Offline
Last seen: 4 months 4 days ago
kickstarter
Joined: 09/04/2013 - 10:41
Redlynne wrote:
Redlynne wrote:

The way I'd want to run this (if I was building such a system) would be to set things up such that a "rare" drop would essentially be a "1 in a million" event, so you'd be rolling against a random number generator between 0 and 999,999 (essentially). Each Foe NPC you defeat would then add to a bias stack ... say +1 per Pet, +2 per Minion, +3 per Lieutenant, +4 per Boss, +5 per Elite Boss, +6 per Arch-villain, +7 per Monster, +8 per Giant Monster. This bias stacking would continue until it gets "reset" by the award of a "rare" drop. So essentially the odds of getting a "rare" drop progressively improve the longer you *actively* PLAY (as opposed to the longer you stay logged in), but you have to be playing for a really long time before your chances of getting that "rare" drop improve significantly.

I think that it would be easier, and more tweakable, to set up a rollover mechanic. for the reward rolls. So, for example, when a recipe drop is triggered, you generate a percentile roll and add the character's 'common bias' value to it. 01-90, you generate a random common recipe and add 5 to the 'common bias' field for the character. 91+, you roll over to the next tier of reward and reset the 'common bias' to 0. Generate another percentile roll, and add the character's 'uncommon bias' value to it. 01-90, you generate a random uncommon recipe and add 5 to the character's 'uncommon bias' field. 91+, you roll over to the next tier and reset the 'uncommon bias' to 0. Repeat this process for rare recipes, rolling over to an ultra-rare recipe.

One of the advantages of doing it this way is that it gives you a large number of points where you can tweak the way that the reward distribution works without having to change the mechanics of how the roll is generated. You can create a separate set of rollover values for minions, lieutenants, bosses, AVs, monsters, etc., or even create rollover sets for specific mob types or groups -- an enemy group that's harder to take down, but gives you better drops, for example. If you decide that the higher-tier rewards are too common, you can tweak the rollover points, or adjust how much the bias value is incremented when a check fails to roll over to the next tier up. And you can create 'hidden' rewards within a mission, where completing a particular task adds to one of the bias values, increasing the chance that your next roll -- or an end-of-mission reward -- rolls over to a higher-tier reward.

Radiac
Radiac's picture
Offline
Last seen: 4 months 1 week ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/19/2013 - 15:12
I don't know what CoH had,

I don't know what CoH had, but assuming it was "pure pseudo-randomness" I'm ok with it. I would, however, like it if there were no way to get infl for randomly dropped items besides putting them on the open market/auction house. For one thing, this would eliminate the problem of accidentally selling an NPC a rare or something for way less than it's worth, and for another, it would cause people to have to keep putting all their unwanted stuff on the market where others might buy it for a reasonable price.

On CoH I used to sell my common and uncommon IO recipes to NPC vendors because their buy prices for commons and some/many uncommons were higher than the open market's, but every once in a while you'd get an uncommon someone actually wanted and have to check WW prices on it. I often wondered how many uncommon and rare recipes people just "junked" at NPC vendors instead of throwing them on the market where I might then buy them. In the last year of the game the server population was so low on Triumph and I often thought "I know the uncommon recipe I need for my tanker is not expensive, but then there simply aren't any on the market right now, so I'm at the mercy of other people actually getting one to drop and then choosing to sell it at WW instead of an NPC. I have a lot of infl, finally, and can't buy a CHEAP recipe I need due strictly to availability issues, DARN!"

So it would be nice if the only way to rid yourself of unwanted recipes, enhancements, salvage, etc were to put it on the market in some way so that everything eventually goes to someone who wants to pay infl for it. This of course leads to the problem of "what do we do with all the terrible recipes etc that nobody ever wants?" which I'm still wrestling with myself. Maybe have some kind of timer that it get's deleted by the system and they give you a flat fee for it after, say, a month on the shelf, I don't know.

R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising

Gangrel
Offline
Last seen: 1 week 2 days ago
11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 09/15/2013 - 15:14
Radiac wrote:
Radiac wrote:

I don't know what CoH had, but assuming it was "pure pseudo-randomness" I'm ok with it. I would, however, like it if there were no way to get infl for randomly dropped items besides putting them on the open market/auction house. For one thing, this would eliminate the problem of accidentally selling an NPC a rare or something for way less than it's worth, and for another, it would cause people to have to keep putting all their unwanted stuff on the market where others might buy it for a reasonable price.
On CoH I used to sell my common and uncommon IO recipes to NPC vendors because their buy prices for commons and some/many uncommons were higher than the open market's, but every once in a while you'd get an uncommon someone actually wanted and have to check WW prices on it. I often wondered how many uncommon and rare recipes people just "junked" at NPC vendors instead of throwing them on the market where I might then buy them. In the last year of the game the server population was so low on Triumph and I often thought "I know the uncommon recipe I need for my tanker is not expensive, but then there simply aren't any on the market right now, so I'm at the mercy of other people actually getting one to drop and then choosing to sell it at WW instead of an NPC. I have a lot of infl, finally, and can't buy a CHEAP recipe I need due strictly to availability issues, DARN!"

I thought that the WW/BM were *game wide* as in every server used the same WW/BM... so any shortage that you would have perceived could well have been a global shortage (either through people just vendoring the recipes or them being in that much demand)

Quote:

So it would be nice if the only way to rid yourself of unwanted recipes, enhancements, salvage, etc were to put it on the market in some way so that everything eventually goes to someone who wants to pay infl for it. This of course leads to the problem of "what do we do with all the terrible recipes etc that nobody ever wants?" which I'm still wrestling with myself. Maybe have some kind of timer that it get's deleted by the system and they give you a flat fee for it after, say, a month on the shelf, I don't know.

Quote:

1) I reject your reality.... and substitute my own
2) Not to be used when upset... will void warranty
3) Stoke me a clipper i will be back for dinner
4) I have seen more intelligence from an NPC AI in TR beta, than from most MMO players.

Lin Chiao Feng
Lin Chiao Feng's picture
Offline
Last seen: 5 days 26 min ago
Developerkickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 11/02/2013 - 09:27
Radiac wrote:
Radiac wrote:

I would, however, like it if there were no way to get infl for randomly dropped items besides putting them on the open market/auction house. For one thing, this would eliminate the problem of accidentally selling an NPC a rare or something for way less than it's worth, and for another, it would cause people to have to keep putting all their unwanted stuff on the market where others might buy it for a reasonable price.
On CoH I used to sell my common and uncommon IO recipes to NPC vendors because their buy prices for commons and some/many uncommons were higher than the open market's, but every once in a while you'd get an uncommon someone actually wanted and have to check WW prices on it. I often wondered how many uncommon and rare recipes people just "junked" at NPC vendors instead of throwing them on the market where I might then buy them.

These are some of the reasons why I proposed merging vendors and the market some weeks back. In a nutshell, you only ever buy and sell from a market interface, where you can see the current prices and stock of whatever you're buying or selling. Further, for some items meant to be "vendor trash" (i.e. a way for players to get cash) you simply have the store be a "buyer" with infinite demand at a fixed price.

And yes, Gangrel, there was really only one market across the whole game.

Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...

Gangrel
Offline
Last seen: 1 week 2 days ago
11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 09/15/2013 - 15:14
Lin Chiao Feng wrote:
Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

And yes, Gangrel, there was really only one market across the whole game.

Thought as much. My memory was hazy, and as I played on the EU servers at one point (way before Freedom), I seem to remember posts on the EU forums about the market going down (which just so happened to coincide with US market downtime as well)...

As I said, my memory was hazy though. Thanks for clarifying.

Quote:

1) I reject your reality.... and substitute my own
2) Not to be used when upset... will void warranty
3) Stoke me a clipper i will be back for dinner
4) I have seen more intelligence from an NPC AI in TR beta, than from most MMO players.

Pleonast
Pleonast's picture
Offline
Last seen: 2 months 1 week ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/13/2013 - 19:38
JayBezz wrote:
JayBezz wrote:

Pleonast wrote:
I don't like having drops in a superhero game. More specifically, heroes shouldn't be getting loot. It's okay for villains to get loot. :D
And if we have drops, I'm kind of against having different rarities at all. I think all loot should be of equivalent value, in terms of game balance. That is, all "level 20" items should be the same value. The difference between drops should be their utility to the player. So maybe the +20 healing item has the same value as the +15 melee-damage item, but one of them is more useful to me than the other.

Does this mean you're against different "colored" loot for loot level that does not correspond with character level?

Yes. There should not be variation in the "game-balance" value of drops. Variance should be in the utility of the drop to a specific player.

Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

Which is kinda-sorta where I was going with the more cards, less dice model. What if, for a given trial or whatever, the reward drops were, for example, spread across a "deck" of 12 cards, with 8 cards being the rewards (which combined give you the Big Awesome Thing) and the other 4 being bonus items (useful, not a booby prize per se, but not part of the combo). This "deck" is specific to your character, and gets "shuffled" when your character starts the trial for the first time. When you complete the trial, a card is drawn, and you get the corresponding reward. After the last card gets drawn, the deck gets reshuffled.
This gives you some randomness to spice things up without making you a slave to the RNG. Because, as much as you might feel uber leet when you get a very rare drop, that was still more luck than skill because someone else who did far better than you at that raid, and further did it five times as much as you, somehow still hasn't gotten a drop like that. Thinking your reward was from skill is implying that their lack of reward is indicative of lack of skill.
This isn't crypto. There's no optimization requirement that rewards be RNG-determined.

I like this idea a lot. Instead of drops being drawn from an infinite-deck of a loot table, drops should be drawn from a finite deck that gets reshuffled after its all gone.

In terms of game balance, a finite deck is actually easier than an infinite deck, because everything drops at exactly the designed frequency. No player is going to win the lottery and get several ultra-rare drops in a short time. Every player will get exactly the same distribution of drops, albeit in a shuffled order.

Zombie Man wrote:

It seems the source of angst over rare drops is when there is a huge disparity in drops and overall reward.
If you spend an hour in a Trial, you shouldn't have the reward range be from Common to Very Rare, but rather Rare or Very Rare, or, at the least, 4 Uncommons. The rationale is that if you have two people do exactly the same thing, one should not walk away with a hundred million points and the other walk away with just a thousand points.
The same thing among other tasks. If you have the drop, regardless of rarity which is fetching a billion points on the market... then that in and of itself is a sign that Something Is Wrong. You don't want to randomly make someone a billionaire because of a lucky roll.
So, rather than find ways to make everyone a member of the Suddenly a Billionaire club, we need to find ways to ease runaway inflation on certain coveted items and flatten out the range of the worthiness of drops from garbage to billions.

Yes, that is the point. Please consider Lin Chiao Feng's finite-deck idea.

And it needn't be limited to trials/taskforces. There can be a deck for each zone/neighborhood/etc. A zone would probably need a bigger deck, like 100 or 1000 cards.

(In terms of implementation, I don't think large decks impose much more burden on the server than small ones. You basically just need to store a pointer for each character and zone into a one of several pre-shuffled decks. You wouldn't need to keep a shuffled deck for every character, maybe 100 (or 1000) pre-shuffled decks into which every character points into.)

Kickstart Backer # 771

JayBezz
JayBezz's picture
Offline
Last seen: 4 years 8 months ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/08/2013 - 14:54
Pleonast wrote:
Pleonast wrote:

JayBezz wrote:
Pleonast wrote:
I don't like having drops in a superhero game. More specifically, heroes shouldn't be getting loot. It's okay for villains to get loot. :D
And if we have drops, I'm kind of against having different rarities at all. I think all loot should be of equivalent value, in terms of game balance. That is, all "level 20" items should be the same value. The difference between drops should be their utility to the player. So maybe the +20 healing item has the same value as the +15 melee-damage item, but one of them is more useful to me than the other.

Does this mean you're against different "colored" loot for loot level that does not correspond with character level?

Yes. There should not be variation in the "game-balance" value of drops. Variance should be in the utility of the drop to a specific player.

I disagree with this. It may not be an incentive for some players but if the gear is going to be flat bonuses then it loses its raison d'etre. Not to mention all the things gear quality does for player retention.

Crowd Control Enthusiast

Fireheart
Fireheart's picture
Offline
Last seen: 2 months 2 weeks ago
11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/05/2013 - 13:45
So, combine the approaches,

So, combine the approaches, Infinite Table for some loot and Finite Stack for others. Have some sort of sliding scale/window based on level? Or do we want to have a chance of getting the 'incredible loot' on a first-level toon? Perhaps, each time the character passes a 'level-gate', a new deck of higher-level loot gets added to their stack?

Be Well!
Fireheart

Radiac
Radiac's picture
Offline
Last seen: 4 months 1 week ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/19/2013 - 15:12
Here's something I don't like

Here's something I don't like about the finite deck approach:

Suppose the Statesman TF had a finite deck of loot instead of the random Hamio or whatever it had. If I get the one thing I consider "awesomest" out of that TF early on, I have less/maybe even zero economic motivation to do it again with a group.

I don't think we should let petty greed and jealosy of immature gamers obsessed with "winning" or "being the best" drive the loot drop mechanics. I mean, SO WHAT if someone else just got their second purple drop in as many days? Good for them, no skin off of your back. It's not like they took it away from you. The idea that there should be some form of equal wealth distribution to players per hour played a seems wrong to me. It's been proven that if you want people do do something, rewarding them purely at random for it is the best payout schedule there is, psychologically. There are places where a game can sometimes suffer from too much randomness, I think this is a place where not enough is bad. Besides, I still think there should be Merits for doing virtually everything, and swag available from merits from vendors. That and influence earned are your form of constant, reliable, boring reward for playing. The random drops are the fun, exciting/disappointing, random part. I hate it when things are too predictable.

R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising

cybermitheral
cybermitheral's picture
Offline
Last seen: 8 months 5 days ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 08/21/2013 - 20:54
I liked Redlynne's option but

I liked Redlynne's option but I also think there should be a cap on the increase.
Using her example where 1,000,000 or above equals a Very Rare drop the bias stack should be capped at something like 250,000 so you still have a random factor in it.

Also IF there are things like Reward/Alignment Merits where we can purchase non-Store Rare/Very Rare items for these special currency then we may not want to guarantee a drop.

We could also change the drop chance based on the mission type and how the team/soloer performed.
Example1: Stealth Mission
Goal is to avoid killing as much as possible and sneak through.
If you kill < 5% of foes on the map you get a large +Bias Stack
If you kill > 50% of foes you get no +Bias Stack
Maybe even if you Kill All you get -Bias Stack...?

Example2: Destroy Objects Missions
Goal is to destroy X amount of objects. Y amount of Objects exist.
Destroy X = + small Bias Stack
Destroy Y = + large Bias Stack

Example3: Survival Mission/Trial/Special
Survive for as long as you can without dying.
Last 5 waves = + small Bias Stack
Last 10 waves = +medium Bias Stack
Last 20 waves = + large Bias Stack
Last 40 waves = +huge Bias Stack

Some missions wont need such modifiers - such as pass/fail missions like Kill All's.

The Phoenix Rising Initiative Rules Lawyer

Fireheart
Fireheart's picture
Offline
Last seen: 2 months 2 weeks ago
11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/05/2013 - 13:45
So, I just wanted to mention

So, I just wanted to mention that I rate these drapes 'Ecru', at best.

Be Well!
Fireheart

Redlynne
Redlynne's picture
Offline
Last seen: 1 day 2 hours ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/28/2013 - 21:15
cybermitheral wrote:
cybermitheral wrote:

I liked Redlynne's option but I also think there should be a cap on the increase.

Although it may look like there isn't a cap (because there isn't), the net overall effect in practice is that the sheer number of dice rolls involved effectively "invokes" a cap all on its own simply through random distribution. Even a max chance of 25% for a Roll Rare won't last very long when you're throwing dice hundreds of times within a single mission instance (for example) because that's how many Foe NPCs you (and your Team) are defeating. That's because as soon as a successful Roll Rare occurs, the bonus/bias collapses back to +0 and has to start all over again.

This is just one of those cases where, counter-intuitively, putting a cap on it only makes sense if you set the cap as being arbitrarily low ... such as at 5% chance or less. This is because the additive end of the bonus/bias accumulates so slowly (I would consider a requirement to defeat 5000 Minions to earn a +1% chance for a Rare Drop per NPC Defeat to be a "sufficiently slow" rate of bonus accumulation, wouldn't you?).


Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.
Lin Chiao Feng
Lin Chiao Feng's picture
Offline
Last seen: 5 days 26 min ago
Developerkickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 11/02/2013 - 09:27
Radiac wrote:
Radiac wrote:

Suppose the Statesman TF had a finite deck of loot instead of the random Hamio or whatever it had. If I get the one thing I consider "awesomest" out of that TF early on, I have less/maybe even zero economic motivation to do it again with a group.

  • This assumes that everything else in the deck is worthless. If true, that would be a deck-design error.
  • Players already do this with dice-roll systems. LOL I got my VR loot to make my T4 Alpha, later losers!
  • The deck system is better suited for situations where there isn't just one "awesomest" loot drop, but when there are several, and you need to get a set of them in order to craft some awesome (and usually class-specific) thing.
Radiac wrote:

I don't think we should let petty greed and jealosy of immature gamers obsessed with "winning" or "being the best" drive the loot drop mechanics. I mean, SO WHAT if someone else just got their second purple drop in as many days?

Exactly. So what about them?

This is about the folks who haven't gotten a purple drop in 100 attempts.

Bear in mind, about a year ago I was playing Tera, which (among many other things) has a mechanic where you can only push a crafted ("enchanted") item from +9 to +12 if you "masterwork" it first. To masterwork something, you have to get a Master Enigmatic Scroll (MES), which removes all the bonuses on the item and has a 3% chance of making it a masterwork item.

MESs are really hard to get (you might get 1 or 2 on a big raid, though half the time you probably won't get one), so getting to roll the dice at all is really rare. Further, there are a lot of cases where players have burned 100 or more MESs and still don't have a masterwork item to show for it. This is the kind of "getting screwed over by the RNG" system I would like to see avoided.

Radiac wrote:

It's been proven that if you want people do do something, rewarding them purely at random for it is the best payout schedule there is, psychologically.

Really? Please cite sources, because the example I remember is that the monkey rewarded with cucumbers gets really pissed off when the other monkey gets grapes for the same work.

Radiac wrote:

I hate it when things are too predictable.

And I hate when they're too random.

Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...

Radiac
Radiac's picture
Offline
Last seen: 4 months 1 week ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/19/2013 - 15:12
We may have to agree to

We may have to agree to disagree. I think trying to affect drop rates beyond the simple pseudo-randomness, to me, is a fool's errand. It is my firm belief that you're never going to satisfy any of the unsatisfied people you're trying to help when you do that. If a kid is the type of person who would complain "MOM! Billy opened a Golden Ticket in his Wonka Bar, so now I have to have one!!! It's not fair!!! Wahhhh!" nothing you can do is ever going to be enough for that kid. There will still be differences in drops from person to person, and those same people who are never satisfied will still be unsatisfied. The idea that someone else won the lottery so therefore this game is flawed because we didn't ALL win that same lottery too (and most importantly to the petulant child, because HE or SHE did not personally win it, forget everyone else) is lunacy.

It's a game, not a job. For me, it's about enjoying RP and blasting badguys and saving the day. It's not supposed to be a totally equal wealth distribution system where everyone get's the same exact reward all the time for the same exact thing. And again, the influence and merits already do that anyway. If you don't like randomness, why not get rid of loot drops completely and just give everyone merits and influence for everything they do, and make everything a player might want available for merits and influence? Problem solved right there, right? Personally, I don't like that. The reason I want random drops is because it's a form of gambling, I'm not going to lie. It's a random reward, and I get excited when I see a new shiny appear in my bag of loot. More often than not, it's one I can't use, often it's one I can't even sell for any real amount of influence, but I'm ok with that. That just makes the occasional awesome thing I get once in a while that much more special to me.

All of this said, I think it's obvious I'm not a competitive PVPer. In my opinion, RPGs are supoposed to be about RPing and flying around shooting energy blasts out of your eyes and saving the world, not a football game. If you want to make it competitive, in my opinion then it should be fair so that all competitors have an equal chance to achieve victory through skill and strategy, and thus we ought to make all the gear the PVPers need to compete totally available to anyone who wants them for free. That would create a truly level playing field (in terms of PVP gear anyway) and everyone could try to compete and win through skill and strategy alone. The one thing I've noticed about most hardcore PVP fans though is that they need a level playing field to compete, but they really don't want one. Building a toon for PVP, to the people who I call friends whom I've discussed this with, seems to be an exercise in trying to find the most exploitable flaw in the game system and mercilessly crushing everyone by taking full advantage of it until the devs fix it. After that happens, you complain that the game sucks and it's not fair that they nerfed your toon. This, to me, is a self-imposed cycle of giddy megalomania followed by morose disappointment when they take one's unfair toys away. No thanks. Not interested.

R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising

cybermitheral
cybermitheral's picture
Offline
Last seen: 8 months 5 days ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 08/21/2013 - 20:54
I also think (and this may be

I also think (and this may be off-topic here?) that when defeating the Boss all players should be guaranteed a drop of a rarity depending on the boss/mission/difficulty.
Example (using CoH terms):
Normal Mission (+0/x0). Guaranteed White Drop or above
ITF (+0/x0): Guaranteed Yellow Drop or above

Nothing dramatic, nothing that will give everyone a Rare or VRare each time but something. I used to always ensure I had spare room for my Receipes/Salvage/etc when the big boss was about to go down during TF/SF/iTrials but occationally nothing would drop - at all. While 'cash' and XP was earned nothing else often was - or for things like the TF/SF YAY 1 WHITE drop - wooohooo.

The Phoenix Rising Initiative Rules Lawyer

jag40
Offline
Last seen: 7 years 8 months ago
Joined: 09/17/2013 - 10:51
cybermitheral wrote:
cybermitheral wrote:

I also think (and this may be off-topic here?) that when defeating the Boss all players should be guaranteed a drop of a rarity depending on the boss/mission/difficulty.
Example (using CoH terms):
Normal Mission (+0/x0). Guaranteed White Drop or above
ITF (+0/x0): Guaranteed Yellow Drop or above
Nothing dramatic, nothing that will give everyone a Rare or VRare each time but something. I used to always ensure I had spare room for my Receipes/Salvage/etc when the big boss was about to go down during TF/SF/iTrials but occationally nothing would drop - at all. While 'cash' and XP was earned nothing else often was - or for things like the TF/SF YAY 1 WHITE drop - wooohooo.

Something like that could work.

While it's easy for one that got mostly useful drops and good stuff, more often than not to sit there and say that it should be enjoyable and they think it's fair, I do not think themselves are keeping other people in mind any more than the people they accuse of saying it's not fair because they are not getting drops. While in a way it's like winning the lottery, sure if it's happens every so often, hey buddy wont the lottery. But in many cases there have been situations where you have one or two people that seemingly get constantly good drops, sometimes 4-5 purple in one mission while others doing the same thing, get nothing even so much as a one level less rare. If that was the lottery, even the lottery commission usually would be calling foul and investigating to see what is going on. No matter how it's cut or glossed over, there should not be any way that two people are doing the same actions and while one walk away instant billionaire, the other gets nothing for their work while the ones get the drops go around acting like they "earned the drops and give advice like "Play the game and you get the same drops" when with the RNG system that was nearly false. In a nutshell, two people doing the same thing with the wide value of the rewards between players ends up textbook pure plain one get rewarded and the others get ripped off for their efforts. Not saying all the drops must be the same but the gap shouldn't be so large either. And definitely shouldn't be a way that someone gets 4 purps in one mission and the rest gets nothing. Of course they will think the system is fair in their eyes. They are greatly benefiting greatly from it. I bet if the shoe was on the other foot and they never got a single purple and been playing for years, they probably wouldn't look upon it with such glee.

The reward gap shouldn't be too wide. Aka one shouldn't walk away with a bunch of worthless whites and another player gets the same amount of purples. That is worse than the need or greed system. Because the only difference is that instead of player actions causing one person to get all the good stuff, the game mechanics is seemingly choosing one person to get all the good stuff instead. The end result is still the same. I think in some cases there should be guaranteed rewards, aka if you do this and that TF you have chance to get either rare-very rare item. Or uncommon to rare item.

If influence is enough as one person said supposedly even though they also said they more often than not got good drops, then they should be satisfied and see no issue if the case was that the gambling mechanism is taken out and simply be that influence is the only reward. It's probably hard for them to see and feel about the other side because they never been on the other side and not know how it feel to not get good drops more often than not even though they played for years, put in great deal of money into the game and a lot of hours. It's easy to say something is fair when on the side that it's benefits most. But the question is if they were on the other side and never got any drop would they feel the same? I doubt it because they straight up said they wouldn't like it if the reward was only influence, yet, in reality that they do not seem to realize walking away with only influence as a reward was the reality of some people that wasn't as lucky as them to get good drops more often than not. And just as he said he wouldn't like it if influence was the only reward, then how can he expect them to like it when they walk away with influence as the only reward?

HelBlaiz
Offline
Last seen: 10 years 1 month ago
kickstarter
Joined: 02/08/2014 - 05:39
I actually like the shuffled

I actually like the shuffled deck mechanic being discussed, personally. If such a system were decided on, I could see an interesting veteran reward or some such that would allow you to "reset" the deck prematurely, so if you got the +4 pants of evasion after only three tries, but want the chance for another sooner, you could reset the deck so you wouldn't have to grind the same trial/whatever so many times before even having a CHANCE at it again.

On a completely different topic, but I feel it relates in some respect, I would love if CoT cuts down on the inventory management. One of the few things that ruins my fun more than anything else in games with drops is never having enough inventory space to carry everything. While I would LOVE an infinite inventory, I realize there are probably a Christmas list of reasons why such a thing would be bad. I never really cared much while playing CoH when my inventory was full because I either got something, or I didn't, I never had to choose to drop something for something else, I just lost the chance to get better things by having a full inventory. A possible solution that might work for my plight would probably be remote shops to sell uninteresting things at quickly or an automatic "send to bank" system when my inventory's full, so I can deal with the boring stuff later instead of in the middle of running missions with a bunch of awesome, fun friends. If CoT has a similarly easy to forget inventory item drop rate as CoH, however, addressing this problem would allow the loot drops to roll more often between shop visits. More rolls equals better chances, so players like me who forget won't be penalized for running four hours worth of missions back to back instead of breaking momentum with a wonderful group to sell.

Gangrel
Offline
Last seen: 1 week 2 days ago
11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 09/15/2013 - 15:14
HelBlaiz wrote:
HelBlaiz wrote:

On a completely different topic, but I feel it relates in some respect, I would love if CoT cuts down on the inventory management. One of the few things that ruins my fun more than anything else in games with drops is never having enough inventory space to carry everything. While I would LOVE an infinite inventory, I realize there are probably a Christmas list of reasons why such a thing would be bad. I never really cared much while playing CoH when my inventory was full because I either got something, or I didn't, I never had to choose to drop something for something else, I just lost the chance to get better things by having a full inventory. A possible solution that might work for my plight would probably be remote shops to sell uninteresting things at quickly or an automatic "send to bank" system when my inventory's full, so I can deal with the boring stuff later instead of in the middle of running missions with a bunch of awesome, fun friends. If CoT has a similarly easy to forget inventory item drop rate as CoH, however, addressing this problem would allow the loot drops to roll more often between shop visits. More rolls equals better chances, so players like me who forget won't be penalized for running four hours worth of missions back to back instead of breaking momentum with a wonderful group to sell.

Oh agreed, and it was one thing that really did annoy me with CoX compared to other games. Whilst CoX had the "lack of inventory management" because you looted everything automatically, if one section was full, you wouldn't get any more drops related to that storage section at all.

Making there be a "one click to storage" for salvage would be nice... although a "stack counts at one item" would be an improvement as well.

What would this mean for the normal player? Well for one, it would mean that the stack of 20 "clockwork cogs" would count as *one* item. If the person wanted to split them up into 4 stacks of 5? That counts as 4 "items" for the needs of item management.

Is this necessarily perfect? Nope. You can still "run out of storage", but by counting stacks as a single "item slot" for storage means that the amount of time required between trips to sell stuff could help.

But having more "storage" compared to what CoX had would help as well. Sure, you can have dedicated storage for various items, but having a general "overflow" would be handy as well.

I would possibly do it as "General", "salvage", "recipes", "inspirations", "enhancements" (if going the CoX route), so that whilst each type of loot will fall automatically into the "correct bag" as it were, the general tab could be where stuff goes that you *cannot* hotlink necessarily to your action bars. It would also be the place where excess items from one or other of the other categories would fall.

Just a thought.

And now back to your regularly scheduled thread.

Quote:

1) I reject your reality.... and substitute my own
2) Not to be used when upset... will void warranty
3) Stoke me a clipper i will be back for dinner
4) I have seen more intelligence from an NPC AI in TR beta, than from most MMO players.

Radiac
Radiac's picture
Offline
Last seen: 4 months 1 week ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/19/2013 - 15:12
Gangrel wrote:
Gangrel wrote:

HelBlaiz wrote:
On a completely different topic, but I feel it relates in some respect, I would love if CoT cuts down on the inventory management. One of the few things that ruins my fun more than anything else in games with drops is never having enough inventory space to carry everything. While I would LOVE an infinite inventory, I realize there are probably a Christmas list of reasons why such a thing would be bad. I never really cared much while playing CoH when my inventory was full because I either got something, or I didn't, I never had to choose to drop something for something else, I just lost the chance to get better things by having a full inventory. A possible solution that might work for my plight would probably be remote shops to sell uninteresting things at quickly or an automatic "send to bank" system when my inventory's full, so I can deal with the boring stuff later instead of in the middle of running missions with a bunch of awesome, fun friends. If CoT has a similarly easy to forget inventory item drop rate as CoH, however, addressing this problem would allow the loot drops to roll more often between shop visits. More rolls equals better chances, so players like me who forget won't be penalized for running four hours worth of missions back to back instead of breaking momentum with a wonderful group to sell.

Oh agreed, and it was one thing that really did annoy me with CoX compared to other games. Whilst CoX had the "lack of inventory management" because you looted everything automatically, if one section was full, you wouldn't get any more drops related to that storage section at all.
Making there be a "one click to storage" for salvage would be nice... although a "stack counts at one item" would be an improvement as well.
What would this mean for the normal player? Well for one, it would mean that the stack of 20 "clockwork cogs" would count as *one* item. If the person wanted to split them up into 4 stacks of 5? That counts as 4 "items" for the needs of item management.
Is this necessarily perfect? Nope. You can still "run out of storage", but by counting stacks as a single "item slot" for storage means that the amount of time required between trips to sell stuff could help.
But having more "storage" compared to what CoX had would help as well. Sure, you can have dedicated storage for various items, but having a general "overflow" would be handy as well.
I would possibly do it as "General", "salvage", "recipes", "inspirations", "enhancements" (if going the CoX route), so that whilst each type of loot will fall automatically into the "correct bag" as it were, the general tab could be where stuff goes that you *cannot* hotlink necessarily to your action bars. It would also be the place where excess items from one or other of the other categories would fall.
Just a thought.
And now back to your regularly scheduled thread.

I could be remembering this wrong, but I'm pretty sure CoX DID put like objects in stacks, i.e. I'd look and see how many "Hamidon Costumes" I had and it would be like 20, or Candy Canes, or whatever. Being able to sock stuff away in storage with aclick would be nice, but the devs (ok, Jack Emmert) wanted to make people have to walk/fly/teleport/jump around town a lot, just to make those "completely useless in combat" powers seem more useful to the power gamers who would otherwise avoid them (and many still did until IOs came out). One thing I would have liked would be to ability to tell the game what type of Enhancements were your priorities. The idea being it could be set to keep SOs over DOs over TOs and you could tell it to keep higher level stuff at the expense of lower level stuff, (or not), and/or you could tell it which types of enhancements to keep and which not to worry about, or you could maybe make a hierarchy of "damage>accuracy>recharge rate>interupt time..." etc.

R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising

Gangrel
Offline
Last seen: 1 week 2 days ago
11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 09/15/2013 - 15:14
Radiac wrote:
Radiac wrote:

I could be remembering this wrong, but I'm pretty sure CoX DID put like objects in stacks, i.e. I'd look and see how many "Hamidon Costumes" I had and it would be like 20, or Candy Canes, or whatever. Being able to sock stuff away in storage with aclick would be nice, but the devs (ok, Jack Emmert) wanted to make people have to walk/fly/teleport/jump around town a lot, just to make those "completely useless in combat" powers seem more useful to the power gamers who would otherwise avoid them (and many still did until IOs came out). One thing I would have liked would be to ability to tell the game what type of Enhancements were your priorities. The idea being it could be set to keep SOs over DOs over TOs and you could tell it to keep higher level stuff at the expense of lower level stuff, (or not), and/or you could tell it which types of enhancements to keep and which not to worry about, or you could maybe make a hierarchy of "damage>accuracy>recharge rate>interupt time..." etc.

It did, but it didn't at the same time.

Salvage is a good example of this, The salvage for actual *crafting* although it stacked, a stack of 10 items, counted as 10 items towards your salvage inventory limit.

I believe that the candy canes and similar (Halloween Salvage) were *exempt* from this, but it has been so long, I actually cannot remember if they were in the "generic salvage" group or not. I have a feeling that they weren't.

Hell, I could be wrong on the Halloween Salvage as well....

Quote:

1) I reject your reality.... and substitute my own
2) Not to be used when upset... will void warranty
3) Stoke me a clipper i will be back for dinner
4) I have seen more intelligence from an NPC AI in TR beta, than from most MMO players.

Radiac
Radiac's picture
Offline
Last seen: 4 months 1 week ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/19/2013 - 15:12
Admittedly, Enhancements

Admittedly, Enhancements never stacked, as far as I can remember, except maybe in SG storage bins.

R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising

Gangrel
Offline
Last seen: 1 week 2 days ago
11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 09/15/2013 - 15:14
Radiac wrote:
Radiac wrote:

Admittedly, Enhancements never stacked, as far as I can remember, except maybe in SG storage bins.

If they stacked, it was just a visual "of stacking". They still took up "X slots" of storage space, where X is the size of the stack.

Quote:

1) I reject your reality.... and substitute my own
2) Not to be used when upset... will void warranty
3) Stoke me a clipper i will be back for dinner
4) I have seen more intelligence from an NPC AI in TR beta, than from most MMO players.

Pyromancer
Pyromancer's picture
Offline
Last seen: 9 years 5 months ago
Joined: 12/30/2013 - 17:34
I support a moderate MMO

I support a moderate MMO dungeon drop rate with a token system in case you get really unlucky, that way you can at least get something for your half dozen fruitless raids. I also support the salvage and invention system as a type of backup for those who cannot raid often or have excess currency.
.
To be honest I disliked Diablo 3 system of completely random drops and magic find and game of auction house sweep every 3 levels to be competitive... I really disliked that.

If possible there should be many scaling options of difficulty for raids for those who want to push it to the extreme and get the best/most rewards faster, or slower and easier. A lot like what RedLynne said. I also agree with Brand X, a low drop rate with auction house was fine because end game drops were icing on the superpower cake so to speak, you did not need the best accolades or enhancements to succeed, only to excel.

Every item drop should be automatic and separate. No need to right click loot on people and no need/greed/pass. Really makes you less heroic/villainous, scrounging through pockets then rolling for things.

And finally a bit off topic: A few Origin restricted enhancement sets, inventions, shops, story arcs, and things should make a return, it added that much additional depth and flavor to the game, but was not critical.

Every villain is a hero in their own mind.

charlieranger
charlieranger's picture
Offline
Last seen: 5 years 2 months ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/08/2013 - 19:46
I am one of the unlucky ones.

I am one of the unlucky ones. I was a 7 year COX vet and only got 4 VR enhancements. I had resigned myself to never getting them to the point that when I did get one, I literally had to focus all my energy on bowel control. My VRs were earned with countless hours buying, selling, and trading at WW to get recipies and crafting mats. Due to my overly intensive and unsuccessful efforts to get VR enhancements(mostly due to the prohibiting inf cost), I was glad to pay $$ for VR enhancements.
When incarnates was released I was so happy that my perseverance would finally pay off at a reasonable, fairly calculable rate. The system also required more than just a strait C to UC to R to VR tree. Each tear required the others every upgrade, So even if I only got Cs and UCs, at least I could put that in my completed checklist. It also allowed threads or shards to work towards your power goal, which meant you weren't locked into one form of grinding to get your power. It was a big mental boost. At that point I didn't care if everybody else got VR drops because I knew time was on my side. I am all for an exchangeable drop system similar to the incarnates system.

My thoughts would be a system where a power has say, 6 enhancement slots. Each slot has an enhancement tree. The player chooses what aspect of the power they want to enhance and build the tree towards the final enhancement. As a player fills each slot with whatever power bonus they choose, set bonuses are given. If a player wants to work night and day to increase every slot with damage, they can. Set bonuses would be assigned as they filled they're second, third, ect.. slots to give other complimentary damage bonus aspects. If a player wanted a different enhancement in every slot, as they filled the slots, a jack-of-all-trades set of bonuses would be awarded. With and exchange system in "crafting" rewards, a player could remove a power from an enhancement and not have to start from nothing all over again. Also, with the "smart" changing of the set bonuses, each player would be further unique with however they wanted to build their powers.

Since all drops for enhancements are generic C, UC, R, or VR, with this system it will be harder to see items at the auction house selling for astronomical amounts. Every player would be progressing towards maximizing their powers at a more predictable rate. Every player would know they it was their efforts that got them that set of enhancements. With this system you could use either the "deck" rewards system, or a modified % rewards system. It would also allow for multiple types of reward earning so players could focus on playing how they want to play and personalizing their character.

dawnofcrow
dawnofcrow's picture
Offline
Last seen: 6 years 3 months ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/31/2013 - 08:56
Drap rates for high end items

Drap rates for high end items > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxfkWZPAUg4

whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster and when you look into the abyss, the abyss also look into you, -Friedrich

Fireheart
Fireheart's picture
Offline
Last seen: 2 months 2 weeks ago
11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/05/2013 - 13:45
Please, 'drap' is not a word.

Please, 'drap' is not a word. You mean Drop.

Be Well!
Fireheart

Brand X
Brand X's picture
Offline
Last seen: 4 years 5 months ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 11/01/2013 - 00:26
dawnofcrow wrote:
dawnofcrow wrote:

Drap rates for high end items > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxfkWZPAUg4

So a video that basically tells us people are idiots? >_>

Seriously, have we not all heard players go into something they know someone has to lose (for instance PvP) and hate it because they lost. :p

Same with drops. If everyone gets it, they feel like they didn't win. They're not ahead.

Not saying that's everyone's feelings, but like the video said (actually like a lot of their videos seem to say), it's prevalent amongst people. There's what people say they want, and then there's what they really want.

Radiac
Radiac's picture
Offline
Last seen: 4 months 1 week ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/19/2013 - 15:12
Anecdotally:

Anecdotally:

I play Magic: The Gathering. When I go to tournaments, there are usually vendors there with tables set up selling all manner of cards. One tends to comparison shop. One time at a tournament, I noticed that one vendor had three copies of the same foil card for three different prices. Now, the obvious overt reason for this, usually, is the condition of the individual cards. Some are "mint or near mint" and others are "slightly played" or "moderately played" or even "heavily played", and in cases where the card in question sells for over $100, I can certainly see where people would be very careful what they pay for etc. But in the case of a $5 card, the fact the one of them is tagged at $4 and another is $6, in my opinion, is only being done with the following in mind: you see the $6 version, then you see the $4 version and think "What a deal!" and buy it. The labeling of one Magic card at an inflated price makes the cheaper ones sell better. I totally felt myself wanting to buy cards I saw at lower priced even after I noticed this and brought it up to my player friends. You can't fight human nature, even if you're fighting for what is basically a truly just cause. People... we're our own worst enemy.

So what Penny's should have done was price some shirts at $50 and then other copies of the exact same shirt at like $10, labeling them as "slightly worn" or "factory defects" or something.

R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising

Radiac
Radiac's picture
Offline
Last seen: 4 months 1 week ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 10/19/2013 - 15:12
To bring it back to a

To bring it back to a discussion about CoT though, I think CoX's crafting system was good. You had different rarities of salvage and recipes which made it feel like getting an awesome "winner" moment when a good one dropped. People farmed for salvage and recipes even. One somewhat weird side effect though was that some low level swag as actually MORE hard to get than the level 50 stuff, since nobody spent a lot of time at levels 1-20 anyway.

R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising

cybermitheral
cybermitheral's picture
Offline
Last seen: 8 months 5 days ago
kickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 08/21/2013 - 20:54
And that Alchemical Silver

And that Alchemical Silver which was used in a lot of recipes costs a bucket load on the AH as it didn't drop THAT frequently (for me anyway - I used to always think "YAY I got Alchemical Silver" [a white item] when I saw it in my 'bag' but "Great - a Gold [Yellow item] - dump that")

The Phoenix Rising Initiative Rules Lawyer

Beamrider
Beamrider's picture
Offline
Last seen: 1 year 4 months ago
Developerkickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 12/05/2012 - 21:41
Was one of the many who would

Was one of the many who would work out a bunch of AE missions for ticket to trade in for Alchemical Slivers to dump on the markets at 'reasonable' prices when the price seemed to be getting TOO rediculous, Not that it seemed to do that much good.

Composition Team

Cinnder
Cinnder's picture
Offline
Last seen: 2 years 3 weeks ago
Gunterkickstarter11th Anniversary Badge
Joined: 08/26/2013 - 16:24
Beamrider wrote:
Beamrider wrote:

Was one of the many who would work out a bunch of AE missions for ticket to trade in for Alchemical Slivers to dump on the markets at 'reasonable' prices when the price seemed to be getting TOO rediculous, Not that it seemed to do that much good.

You still get a gold star for trying.

Spurn all ye kindle.